After the introduction of the September 5, 2018 'Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act', Amazon announced to its workers on October 2, 2018, that the minimum wage paid to salaried workers be increased to $15 per hour.[153] The wage increase applies to about 350,000 workers. It does not apply to the majority of Amazon's employees who are contract workers. Furthermore, Amazon has also removed some grants and stock options.

On October 16, 2016, Apple filed a trademark infringement case against Mobile Star LLC for selling counterfeit Apple products to Amazon. In the suit, Apple provided evidence that Amazon was selling these counterfeit Apple products and advertising them as genuine. Through purchasing, Apple was able to identify that nearly 90% of the Apple accessories sold and fulfilled by Amazon were counterfeit. Amazon was sourcing and selling items without properly determining if they are genuine. Mobile Star LLC settled with Apple for an undisclosed amount on April 27, 2017.[164]

Though more people shopped in-store and online on Black Friday 2017, Cyber Monday continues to beat Black Friday’s online sales. Last year, 81 million consumers shopped on Cyber Monday, bringing in $6.59 billion for retailers. 2017 marked a year-over-year increase of nearly 17 percent and set an all-time record of the most ever spent on the digital holiday.
Now when you shop with Amazon.com, a portion of your purchase will help support the work of the American Institute for Cancer Research. Through AmazonSmile, a website operated by Amazon, you can enjoy the same wide selection of products, low prices, and convenient shopping features as on Amazon.com. The difference is that when you shop on AmazonSmile, the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price to AICR.

"Search Inside the Book" is a feature which allows customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog.[126][127] The feature started with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003.[128] There are about 300,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches.[citation needed]

Thought about upgrading your tablet? Do it now and save on Amazon! Trade in your old Fire tablet today and an Amazon Gift Card equal to the appraised value of your old tablet, plus a bonus 25% off any of the current generation Fire tablets will be applied to your account. Click this coupon to select your tablet model and start the trade-in to save!
Amazon puts all of its daily deals into a Gold Box. Check the Today's Deals page to access these daily deals and get limited-time savings of up to 80% off select items, coupons to instantly clip and access to Lightning Deals. Lightning Deals are available only for a limited amount of time and have a countdown timer showing how much time is left to get the discount. Shop before the deal expires or the item sells out.
Some other large e-commerce sellers use Amazon to sell their products in addition to selling them through their own websites. The sales are processed through Amazon.com and end up at individual sellers for processing and order fulfillment and Amazon leases space for these retailers. Small sellers of used and new goods go to Amazon Marketplace to offer goods at a fixed price.[148] Amazon also employs the use of drop shippers or meta sellers. These are members or entities that advertise goods on Amazon who order these goods direct from other competing websites but usually from other Amazon members. These meta sellers may have millions of products listed, have large transaction numbers and are grouped alongside other less prolific members giving them credibility as just someone who has been in business for a long time. Markup is anywhere from 50% to 100% and sometimes more, these sellers maintain that items are in stock when the opposite is true. As Amazon increases their dominance in the marketplace these drop shippers have become more and more commonplace in recent years.[citation needed]
After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual web commerce growth at 2,300%, Bezos created a list of 20 products that could be marketed online. He narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products, which included: compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books. Bezos finally decided that his new business would sell books online, due to the large worldwide demand for literature, the low price points for books, along with the huge number of titles available in print.[27] Amazon was founded in the garage of Bezos' rented home in Bellevue, Washington.[25][28][29] Bezos' parents invested almost $250,000 in the start-up.[30]
Amazon runs data centers for its online services and owns generators or purchases electricity corresponding to its consumption, mostly renewable energy.[139] Amazon contracted with Avangrid to build and operate the first wind farm in North Carolina to power Amazon's Virginia data centers. The wind farm was built and began operating in December 2016 despite opposition from President Trump and some North Carolina Republican legislators.[140][141][142][143][144]
When it comes to last-mile delivery, Amazon has publicly disclosed its work on drones and the Prime Air program to use those unmanned aerial vehicles to drop packages on our doorstep. The project has been in the works since 2013, and it’s hit a few snags as the regulation of US commercial drone operations has been a slow and often painful process for companies trying to get operations off the ground.

Looking for an amazing gift for a birthday or holiday, or perhaps a treat or new gadget for yourself? The As Seen On TV collection from HSN features some of our most incredible items from a wide range of categories. From premium cosmetics and grooming supplies that will have you looking stunning on date night, to handy electronics that will make everyday tasks easier, to gear for both working out and relaxing, there's literally something for everyone in this innovative selection of As Seen On TV products.

Amazon employs a multi-level e-commerce strategy. Amazon started by focusing on business-to-consumer relationships between itself and its customers and business-to-business relationships between itself and its suppliers and then moved to facilitate customer-to-customer with the Amazon marketplace which acts as an intermediary to facilitate transactions. The company lets anyone sell nearly anything using its platform. In addition to an affiliate program that lets anyone post-Amazon links and earn a commission on click-through sales, there is now a program which lets those affiliates build entire websites based on Amazon's platform.[147]
Use apps to check prices in real-time. “The app ShopSavvy is really useful when you’re out shopping in stores because you can scan the barcode on items and see if there is a better deal elsewhere,” says Palmer of Nerdwallet. Woroch is also a fan of ShopSavvy, as well as Flipp, which provides circulars all in one place so you can quickly compare to plan your shopping trip strategically.
That same year, the company launched Dash buttons for instant reordering of products like laundry detergent, and it’s more recently been investing in new services that let package-carrying couriers unlock the truck of your car and even your front door. Most recently, Amazon has signaled an intention to disrupt health care by purchasing online pharmaceutical startup PillPack. All of this has helped Amazon grow its North American retail operation at an unbelievable pace; annual sales for the division more than doubled from $50.8 billion in 2014 to $106.1 billion last year.
That’s a lot of people to compete with, but it can pay off. While smaller items like clothing, consumables, and books won’t see that large of a price cut, Black Friday is still worth the pre-dawn alarm if you’re after deals on big-ticket items. Think: Household appliances, grills, TVs, and other electronics. “Stores use the doorbusters to whip you into a bargain-shopping frenzy in hopes that you'll buy more than the advertised bargains,” says Lisa Lee Freeman, co-host of the Hot Shopping Tips podcast. “The stores often barely break even or even lose money on doorbuster specials, but they make it back when shoppers stick around and buy other items that may not be such great deals.”
In the course of a single generation, Amazon has grown from fledgling online bookseller to one of the most valuable and powerful corporations in modern history. The empire of CEO Jeff Bezos has grown so vast that critics, overseas regulators, and Washington politicians are all now wondering whether the company has become an unstoppable force, and what, if anything, is capable of reining in its reach. A recent spat with Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) resulted in a minimum wage hike for tens of thousands of employees, but Amazon still operates largely without any meaningful checks on its power even as it aggressively expands into physical retail, the smart home, and warehouse and aviation robotics.
But Amazon has been testing its drones for years and performed the first public demo delivery in the US last year. Meanwhile, it continues to submit outlandish patents about its vision for the future of drone delivery, including one for a self-destructing drone that disassembles itself in an emergency and a delivery drone mothership of sorts that would act as a city’s central hub for package-carrying UAVs.
As it stands today, Amazon employs more than half a million people, more so than any other technology company in the country and second only to Walmart in the US. But the eventual result of its investments in robotics and AI is that technology’s biggest and fast-growing workforce could see that growth start to slow and, perhaps years down the line, even shrink as robots tackle ever more complicated tasks. In the process, the company may develop robots for use outside its fulfillment centers. Amazon has already changed how we shop and, by extension, how we live our lives. Its next big step could be changing how we work.
If your new dress doesn't fit right or a gadget arrives broken, Amazon accepts returns on most sales within 30 days of delivery. In general, third-party sellers offer the same policy, although you'll usually have to pay for return shipping to the seller unless the seller advertises free returns, whereas Amazon often provides a prepaid shipping label for its own returns. The cost of the return may be subtracted from the refund if the item was returned for some other reason than Amazon's mistake.
While Amazon was expanding into streaming video, hardware, and cloud computing, it simultaneously maintained an aggressive push into even faster shipping and all new retail formats. The company started its same-day shipping initiative, Prime Now, in New York City in 2014, and it’s since expanded it to dozens of cities around the world. Around the same time, Amazon began a program called AmazonFresh to stock and ship groceries — including vegetables and refrigerated and freezer products — that it used as a way to stay competitive with traditional big-box retailers like Walmart and Target and Uber-like logistics newcomers like Instacart. The company now sells its own line of meal kits through Fresh to rival ready-to-cook options from companies like Blue Apron and Plated.
As Seen On TV is a generic nameplate for products advertised on television in the United States for direct-response mail-order through a toll-free telephone number. As Seen On TV advertisements, known as infomercials, are usually 30-minute shows or two-minute spots during commercial breaks. These products can range from kitchen, household, automotive, cleaning, health, and beauty products, to exercise and fitness products, books, or to toys and games for children. Typically the packaging for these items includes a standardized red seal in the shape of a CRT television screen with the words "AS SEEN ON TV" in white, an intentional allusion to the logo of TV Guide magazine.[citation needed]